'The cheapest thing in Iraq is a human life'

Anthony Loyd, Ali Hamdani, and Ali al Khafaji

Baghdad, February 25, 2006

"WILL all those from the Sha’ab district come forward?" a policeman shouted from the doorway of the mortuary.

A group of Sunni men detached themselves from the crowd in the
yard and shuffled towards him over the blood-stained ground. The
hopeless among them wept and cursed. Others, clinging to the belief
that their missing relatives were somehow still alive, stood in
ashen-faced silence.

Sporadically a spasm of rage ran through the crowd and
accusations were yelled at the gate of the yard, where a checkpoint of
police commandos stared dispassionately at the crowd, blaring Shia
"latmia" music through the loudspeakers on their vehicles as if in
triumph.

Atta Dulaimi, 57, was one of those from the Sha’ab district of
Baghdad, a mixed area in the northeast of the capital, who moved
towards the mortuary door.

The Sunni teacher’s son, Walid, had returned home to Iraq on
Wednesday after nine months working in Syria. Hours after his return,
as he sat talking with his family at his father’s house, gunfire and
explosions erupted outside. A Shia militia unit was attacking the
neighbourhood’s Sunni mosque, blasting it with rocketfire and bullets.

Seconds later gunmen dressed in black burst into Mr Dulaimi’s
house. They dragged Walid out to the street where two pick-up trucks
were waiting. His father stumbled out into the street after them. "It
was no use. I couldn’t do anything. They were so aggressive. They took
my son away and dragged away a neighbour’s son too," Mr Dulaimi told The Times yesterday.

A balding, bespectacled man dressed in a shirt and jersey, he
had no idea whether his son was one of the 127 corpses taken to the
mortuary by midday yesterday after the night of killing by Shia death
squads that followed the destruction of Samarra’s al-Askariya shrine.

Mr Dulaimi’s story was repeated time and time again by those
in the waiting Sunni crowd: men dressed in black, armed and enraged,
attacking mosques, dragging away Sunni men.

From Dora in southern Baghdad, to Sha’ab in the city’s north,
teams of Shia killers had moved apparently unchallenged through the
city, attacking Sunni mosques, rounding up and killing Sunni men,
sometimes cheered on by soldiers at Iraqi army checkpoints.

The conduct of those soldiers should give pause to those in
Britain and America who believe that the new Iraqi Army will be an
impartial force capable of keeping order in the country so that
coalition troops can withdraw.

Wednesday night’s murder spree showed them to be partisan at best, complicit at worse.

At dawn yesterday the fate of Baghdad’s missing Sunni males became clear.

Many were found at the edge of Sadr city, the Shia ghetto in the
north of the city where the al-Mahdi army militia holds sway. The
al-Mahdi army is loyal to the radical cleric Moqtadr al-Sadr, who on
Wednesday demanded revenge for the bombing of Samarra’s al-Askariya
shrine.

"They brought three Sunnis they had captured at Baladiyat
mosque to Sadr city last night," a senior Shia official in the ghetto
told The Times yesterday. "The Sadrists had lost two men
attacking the mosque so as revenge they executed the three publicly in
the streets at 11pm. They have at least 50 or 60 others prisoner;
Sunnis captured from different neighbourhoods."

At the city’s main mortuary yesterday corpses were piled in
the corridors according to the districts where they had been
discovered. Periodically a policeman would shout the name of a district
to the crowd outside and take families to see if they could find their
missing men.

There were no stretchers, sheets or shrouds. The bodies were
simply identified, pulled from the piles, dumped into cheap coffins and
removed from the building by any available transport. Some were simply
tied to the roofs of taxis.

"Don’t cry," one man told his daughter. "We’ve got to get used to this by now. The cheapest thing in Iraq is a human."

Finally it was Mr Dulaimi’s turn. He walked slowly into the
mortuary with his brother and a nephew, looking down at the long line
of corpses. He stopped abruptly. Though he had feared the worst,
nothing had prepared him for the sight of his dead son’s face.
"Tortured!" he cried as he turned to his weeping cousin. "How can one
imagine? They have pulled out his eye and teeth."

WORLD OUTRAGE

"This senseless crime is an affront to people of faith throughout the world."

George W. Bush, US President

"The perpetrators of this act had one motive and one alone. They
want to cause strife and violence between Sunni and Shia to derail
democracy currently taking hold in Iraq."

Tony Blair, British Prime Minister

"This new ugly crime comes as a warning that there is a
conspiracy against the Iraqi people to spark a war among brothers . . .
We must co-operate and work together against this danger, the danger of
civil war."

Jalal Talabani (an ethnic Kurd), President of Iraq

"I hope our heroic people will take more care on this occasion
to bolster Islamic unity and protect Islamic brotherhood and Iraqi
national brotherhood."

Ibrahim al-Jaafari (a Shia), Prime Minister of Iraq

"[The party] strongly condemns this sinful act and calls for a
wide-reaching and objective investigation to catch those behind this
crime that aims to harm the Iraqi people by provoking . . . sectarian
strife."

Uruknet receives daily many hacking attempts. To prevent this, we have 10 websites on 6 servers in different places.
So, if the website is slow or it does not answer, you can recall one of the other web sites: www.uruknet.info www.uruknet.de www.uruknet.biz www.uruknet.org.uk www.uruknet.com www.uruknet.org - www.uruknet.it www.uruknet.eu www.uruknet.net www.uruknet.web.at.it

:: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc.
We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own
that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
:: We always mention the author and link the original site and page of every article.